Amazon’s AI developers are technically smart, business dumb

Like many of you I am awash in digital photos and have been trying to find a good way to manage them. For various reasons I picked Amazon Photos. One of the key benefits was the family vault – a way to let several people upload photos to a shared space. Of course, another reason is to take advantage of Amazon’s facial recognition AI.

So the good news is that both of these seem to work. The shared files are managed nicely on AWS (no surprise that Amazon can do this) and the AI does a pretty good job of recognizing faces and letting you edit this when it makes mistakes. So far so good.

But the facial recognition is account by account and there’s no way to use it in the family vault:

I can look at my photos and identify faces in them. The other members of my family can look at their photos and do the same.

But we can’t say that these two people are the same. I can’t even use the faces they have identified when looking at a family member’s photos – only they can.

Plus there’s no way to see all the photos the family has of a particular person. Which was kind of the point of the family vault.

So why do AI programmers smart enough to do facial recognition fail to realize that they should make this work across a family vault? I suspect because like far too many AI programmers they are focused on the technology. Their success criteria is to make the technology solve a technical problem – identifying faces – not solve a business problem – managing a photo collection.

If you want your AI programmers to focus on the business problem and not the technical problem, check out this paper on our DecisionsFirst™ approach for success with AI.